Thursday, 14 February 2013

On Valentine's Day Poems and Songs

Robert Burns to Bob Dylan

Sadly for tradition, it’s quite possible that we are
celebrating Valentine's Day on the wrong date, however, due to precession of equinoxes and the use
of a Gregorian calendar since 1582. Alternatively, you might celebrate
fertility, in the ancient Roman tradition of Lupercalia during 13-15th
February. If you forget today, then go with the Eastern Orthodox Church,
which offers both the 6th and 30th July.

What's most delightful about Valentine's Day is that it is an opportunity for lovers to reach for
their pens. This may not be great news for classic literature, but I think that
we should celebrate the creative and the linguistic turn that is inspired by
love.

Romantic clichés are not in fact the invention of the modern
commercial world:

The rose is red,
the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet,
and so are you.

Thou art my love
and I am thane;

I drew thee to my
Valentine:

The lot was cast
and then I drew,

And Fortune said
it shou'd be you.

This example comes from a collection of English nursery
rhymes called Gammer Gurton's Garland
published in 1784.

The ‘roses are red echoes’ theme is quite common and may be traced
back to Edmund Spenser's epic poem The
Faerie Queene (1590):

She bath'd with
roses red, and violets blew,

And all the
sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

After Robert Burns’s 1794 Song ‘O my Luve's like a red, red
rose’ such sentiments became the stock-in-trade of the greetings card industry.

The most famous tragic Valentine's Day reference is
delivered in a speech by Ophelia in Shakespeeare’s Hamlet (1600–1):

To-morrow is Saint
Valentine's day,

All in the morning
betime,

And I a maid at
your window,

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose,
and donn'd his clothes,

And dupp'd the
chamber-door;

Let in the maid,
that out a maid

Never departed
more.

Act
IV, Scene 5

The earliest reference to Valentine's Day in English
Literature comes from the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. InThe Parlement
of Foules (1382) he wrote:

For this was on
seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd
comyth there to chese his make.

For this was on
Saint Valentine's Day,

when every bird cometh there to choose his
mate.

One of the earliest surviving valentines is appears in a
fifteenth-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orléans to his wife. At
the time he was being held prisoner in the Tower
of London, after the Battle of
Agincourt:

Je suis desja
d'amour tanné

Ma tres doulce
Valentinée

The legend of the marriage of the birds is picked up by John
Donne in a poem that celebrated the marriage of Lady Elizabeth and Frederick V,
Elector Palatine, on Valentine's Day:

Hayle Bishop
Valentine whose day this is

All the Ayre is
thy Diocese

And all the
chirping Queristers

And other birds ar
thy parishioners

Thou marryest
every yeare

The Lyrick Lark,
and the graue whispering Doue,

The Sparrow that
neglects his life for loue,

The houshold bird with the redd stomacher

Thou makst the
Blackbird speede as soone,

As doth the
Goldfinch, or the Halcyon

The Husband Cock
lookes out and soone is spedd

And meets his
wife, which brings her feather-bed.

This day more cheerfully
than ever shine

This day which
might inflame thy selfe old Valentine.

But I’m choosing Scottish poet Robert Burns and I am looking
forward to warmer weather in June for my Valentine love inspiration: